The Incredible History of Indias Geography

CE. Over the next few decades, they pushed the Gupta defences back into the Gangetic valley. Some part of the empire remained for several generations but their days of glory were gone. After this, a number of powerful kingdoms rose and fell in northern India —the Palas of Bengal, Harsha of Thaneshwar and so on. The city of Pataliputra slowly went into decline and was replaced by Kannauj (now a small town in Uttar Pradesh). Both Nalanda and Ujjain, However, remained important centres of learning. Thinkers like Bhaskara and Varahamihira made great contributions to mathematics and astronomy. Chinese scholars continued to visit India to study Buddhism. Xuan Zang was one such scholar who visited India in the seventh century, over two hundred years after Fa Xian. Like Fa Xian, Xuan Zang also made his way to India through Central Asia. He spent over a decade in the subcontinent during which he criss- crossed the Gangetic plains and went as far East as assam. He even spent two years studying at Nalanda, which was then at the height of its fame. One of the places Xuan Zang visited on his travels was Allahabad (then called Prayag). This town is near the Triveni Sangam or the ‘Mingling of Three rivers’, considered a very sacred site in Hinduism. Two of the rivers are obvious—the Ganga and the Yamuna. The third is supposed to be the Saraswati which is said to flow underground and join the other two at this place. Though this ancient river has vanished, people still remember it. For a Hindu, the sins of a lifetime are believed to be washed away by taking a dip in this confluence of rivers. It is especially auspicious to do this at the time of the Kumbh Mela which is held here every twelve years. This is part of a four-year cycle by which this event is held in turn in Ujjain, Haridwar, Nasik and Allahabad. However, it is the great Kumbh Mela of Allahabad that is the largest and most prestigious. The last time this festival was held in Allahabad in 2013, close to a hundred million people participated in it! Xuan Zang tells us that large numbers of people participated in the festival in the seventh century, including the rulers of different countries and even Buddhists. He also describes the rituals of sadhus or ascetics. A

large wooden column was erected in the middle of the river and the sadhus would climb it. At sunset, they would hang from the column with one leg and one arm while stretching out the other leg and arm into the air. They would then stare at the setting sun. The wooden pole and the particular ritual are no longer around but there are still ash-covered sadhus who visit the Kumbh Mela. Though these continuities are still present, it looks like the economic and cultural centre slowly shifted to the south. Even militarily, the southern kings had become more powerful. When Xuan Zang visited India, the northern plains had come under the rule of Emperor Harsha but he was soundly defeated by the Chalukya king Pulaksen II when he tried to extend his empire into the Deccan. The southern kingdoms had become so powerful because of trade—with the Indianized kingdoms of South East Asia as well as with the Persians and the Arabs who had replaced the Romans in the west. The kingdoms of the south were aware of the importance of trade and actively encouraged it. They were not afraid to fight to keep the trade routes open. The most famous examples of this are the Chola naval expeditions to South East Asia in the eleventh century. The Cholas were an ancient dynasty and are even mentioned in the Ashokan inscriptions. In the ninth to the eleventh century CE, they created an empire that covered most of peninsular India and briefly extended to the banks of the Ganga. The empire even included Sri Lanka and the Maldives! They had very good relations with kingdoms of South East Asia. Inscriptions on both sides show that there were large merchant communities and that the kings exchanged emissaries and gifts often. But a problem probably arose because the Cholas began to create direct trade links with the Song empire in China. Records show that the Cholas and the Chinese exchanged a number of trade delegations in the early eleventh century. Even before this, there was trade between India and China. A large Indian merchant community had been established in Guangzhou and there were even three Hindu temples functioning there. But

there appears to have been a big boom in trade once the Song empire and the Cholas had established direct links. The Srivijaya kings who functioned as middlemen did not like this. They started to tighten controls and imposed heavy taxes on ships passing through the Straits of Malacca. An Arab text tells us that the Srivijaya kings demanded a levy of 20,000 dinars to allow a Jewish-owned ship to continue to China! This was a serious matter and the Cholas were not amused. They conducted a naval raid against Srivijaya in 1017 CE and then a more substantial expedition in 1025. This was a rare example of Indian military aggression outside the subcontinent. It did not last long However; a few decades later, the Cholas and the Srivijayas sent joint embassies to the Chinese. Just as India exerted its influence on South East Asia, there were many influences from the South East that came to the subcontinent. For example, the University of Nalanda grew the way it did because of the strong financial support it received from the Srivijaya kings. South East Asian kingdoms like Angkor, Majapahit and Champa accepted Indian influences and built on them, innovating and adapting them to their own culture. Moreover, the Indonesians independently conducted their own maritime expeditions. From the third to the sixth century CE, they crossed the Indian Ocean and settled in Madagascar in large numbers. The first inhabitants of Madagascar thus came from distant Indonesia and not nearby Africa! The descendants of those Indonesian settlers still form a significant part of the population in Madagascar and the Malay language contains strong influences of dialects from Borneo. A CHAIN OF HISTORY Many scholars say that ancient Indians wrote only one formal history— Kalhana’s Rajatarangini or river of Kings, a history of the kings of Kashmir written in the twelfth century. They say that this shows how Indians did not have a sense of their history or of the continuity of their civilization. But the

lengthy records maintained by different traditions like the Vanshavali of Nepal or the Burunjis of Assam that keep track of family lineages document the great importance given to remembering the past. Kashmir’s Kalhana saw himself as a link in this chain. He tells us that he read the works of eleven earlier historians and inspected numerous temple inscriptions and land records. He even criticized fellow historian Suvrata for leaving out details and making his history too short! Most of the works Kalhana studied may have been lost but they all clearly existed. Kalhana’s history is followed by three other works that continue the chronicle down to the time of the Mughal emperor Akbar. When Akbar conquered Kashmir in the sixteenth century, he was given a copy of Rajatarangini that was translated to Persian. A summary was then included in the Ain-i-Akbari, the chronicles of Akbar’s own rule, in order to link him into this historical chain. Kalhana’s history is not just about kings and battles; it also contains an interesting account of how human activities changed the landscape of Kashmir. He tells of the minister Suyya who carried out many major engineering works during the reign of Avantivarman in the ninth century. The landslides and soil erosion had led to a great deal of rubble and stone being deposited in the Jhelum river and this was disturbing its flow (the Kashmir floods of 2014 demonstrated the risks). This rubble was removed and embankments were built. The landscape was restructured to human use as dams created new lakes while old ones were drained to clear the way for cultivation. It is suggested that Suyya may have significantly altered the course of the Jhelum and Indus rivers. It looks like much of the ‘natural’ beauty of Kashmir may actually be due to thousands of years of human intervention!

5 Sinbad the Sailor W e’re now in the part of the story when Emperor Harsha was building his empire and Xuan Zang, the second Chinese scholar we discussed, was setting off on his long pilgrimage. Around this time, there was a former merchant called Muhammad whose actions would have a great impact on the world over the years. By the time Prophet Muhammad, the founder of the Islamic religion, died in 632 CE, he already controlled much of the Arabian Peninsula. Within a century, his followers created an empire that stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to Central Asia. In the eighth century, the arabs gained some control in Sindh by defeating Raja Dahir. This victory in Sindh, However, did not seem to have had much effect on the Indian heartland. The Arabs tried to expand further but they were warded off by the Rashtrakuta and the Gurjara-Pratihara kingdoms (the latter gave their name to the state of Gujarat). Arabian records from these times talk of the excellence of the Indian cavalry. The emerging Rajput military class actually seems to have made counter-attacks of its own on the Arab Peninsula and much of Afghanistan continued to be ruled by the Hindu Shahis well into the tenth century. For the first several centuries of Islam, India’s interaction with the religion was not about conquests but about trade.

A SWORD LIKE WATER The Arabs had been actively trading with India even before the origin of Islam. In the early seventh century, the ports along the western coast were regularly visited by Byzantines, Persians, Yemenis, Omanis and even Ethiopians. There were merchants from the Mecca region too. Muhammad probably knew many of the merchants who visited India. The Cheraman Juma Masjid is said to have been established in 629 CE. That would make it India’s oldest mosque and the world’s second oldest one! It’s difficult to prove the exact date but there’s no doubt that the mosque is indeed ancient and that it was built in the early years of Islam. It stands close to the site of ancient Muzaris. Old photographs show that the building was originally built in the style of local temple architecture. Sadly, during renovations in 1984, the old structure was changed and domes and minarets were included to make it appear more ‘Islamic’. Now there is talk of changing it back to attract tourists but it will never quite be the same.

With the creation of the Islamic empire, and with its headquarters in Baghdad, the Arabs controlled a vast trading network. Arab merchants sailed the Mediterranean, criss-crossed the Sahara in camel caravans, traded for Chinese silks in the bazaars of Central Asia and made their way down the East African coast in search of slaves. Do you remember the remarkable adventure tales of Sinbad the Sailor? Even if the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, which belong to this age, are fictional, they quite clearly convey the spirit of the era! The Iraqi port of Basra became the most important trading centre of the empire because of its nearness to the capital. Indian goods and merchants dominated this market so much that the Arabs spoke of Basra as ‘belonging to al-Hind’. The commodities of trade included perfumes, spices, ginger, textiles and medicinal substances. After the Arabs conquered Sindh, large numbers of slaves were also brought in from there. Interestingly, the most important Indian export of the period was the steel sword. Indians were famous at that time for the quality of their metal goods and the swords used by early Muslim armies were often of Indian origin. This remained true even at the time of the Christian Crusades. The famous ‘damascus Sword’ was either imported from India or was made using Indian techniques. A Damascus steel sword is very distinctive to look at. It has patterns in the steel (because of banding and mottling) that give it the appearance of flowing water. Such blades were famous for being tough and resistant to shattering. They could be honed to a very sharp, durable edge. Just as in South East Asia, there were large numbers of Indian merchants who lived along the ports of the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf as well as in inland trading towns. Similarly, Arab merchants also came in large numbers to the ports along India’s western coast. The famous Arab historian and geographer Masudi tells us that Indian kings welcomed the traders and allowed them to build their own mosques. He tells us of a

particularly large settlement of ten thousand Muslims in the district of Saymur where immigrants from Oman, Basra, Siraf and Baghdad had permanently settled. Farther south, there were a number of Arab settlements in Kerala where the Arabs mixed with local converts. Their descendants, the Moplahs or Mappilas, form a quarter of the state’s population today. Since the 1970s, However, these people (and others from Kerala), have been going in large numbers to work in the oil-rich Arab states because of changing times. Meanwhile, farther north, Gujarat became home to the Parsis, followers of the Zoroastrian tradition. As discussed in Chapter 2, the origins of the Zoroastrian tradition are closely linked to the Rig Vedic people. For fifteen hundred years or more, Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion in Persia. But its influence reduced greatly after the Islamic conquest of the region. Religious persecution (the punishment of people who did not follow the faith of the conquerors) was quite common. A small group of Zoroastrians therefore escaped to Gujarat in the eighth century. According to the Qissa-i- Sanjan (an epic poem that the Zoroastrians believe is an account of their early years in the Indian subcontinent) the local Hindu king allowed them to settle on his Land on the condition that they give up their arms and adopt the local language—Gujarati. They were, however, given full freedom to follow their religion. The descendants of these people migrated to Mumbai in the nineteenth century to repair and build ships for the British. Some of them sailed to British-controlled Hong Kong and made large profits from participating in the opium trade with China. The Parsis brought back this money and built large commercial and industrial enterprises in Mumbai. They are still one of India’s most successful business communities. Apart from slaves and merchants, there were several other Indian groups in the Middle East during this period, including mercenaries. A mercenary is a person who fights for money and can be hired by anyone to be on their side during a war. He has no particular loyalty to anyone or any group. According to the oral tradition of the Mohyal Brahmins of Punjab, some of their ancestors died fighting for Hussein in the Battle of Karbala, Iraq in

680 CE. This is why this particular group of Hindus, also known as Husseini Brahmins, still join Shia Muslims during the ritual mourning of Muharram every year. At about the same time, another group from Central India travelled west, across the Middle East, to Europe. We know them today as the Gypsies or the Roma. Language and culture have always indicated that there is a link between the Roma and India, and genetic studies have now confirmed it. We don’t know why this group left the subcontinent; it is possible that they were a group of stranded soldiers from Gurjara-Pratihara armies fighting the Turks and Arabs in Sindh. They were probably always a nomadic group and some circumstances may have made them move westwards. In 1971, at the World Romani conference near London, the Roma adopted a blue and green flag for their nomadic nation. At the centre of the flag, they placed a wheel—the symbol of the Chakravartin. We must admit that the Roma probably have the greatest claim to this symbol now. Their wheels can truly roll in any direction! The exchange of goods, people and ideas was happening within the subcontinent just as it was happening with the outside world. For example, the philosopher Adi Shankaracharya, who was from Kerala in the extreme south, travelled all over the country in the eighth century. His ideas became influential within the subcontinent and beyond it. Similarly, the Shakti tradition associated with the worship of Goddess Durga and her incarnations started in the Eastern regions of Bengal and Assam. However, by the medieval period, there were fifty-two shakti-peeths or pilgrimage sites related to this tradition, which were spread across the subcontinent— from Kamakhya in Assam to hinglaj in Baluchistan, and from Jwalamukhi in Himachal Pradesh to Jaffna in Sri Lanka. There are even Shakti temples in South East Asia. The ninth-century Prambanan temple complex in Central Java, Indonesia, has a shrine dedicated to the goddess Durga slaying

the demon Mahishasura. This exquisitely carved idol would not look out of place in the annual Durga puja festival in modern Kolkata! WATCH OUT, IT’S THE TURKS! In many ways, life in the subcontinent till the beginning of the eleventh century remained more or less the same as earlier times. Maritime trade continued to flourish in the southern ports, and foreign scholars came in large numbers to study in Nalanda. There had been changes in architecture, technology and style, but the cities of the subcontinent would have been quite familiar to a visitor from a thousand years earlier. However, all this was about to change. In the late tenth century, the Turks began to invade the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Afghanistan. In 963 CE, they captured the strategically important town of Ghazni. From there, they conquered the Hindu Shahi kingdom of Kabul and pushed them back into Punjab. The Shahis fought back for decades but on 27 November 1001, they were defeated by Mahmud of Ghazni in a battle near Peshawar. The Shahi king Jayapala was so distraught that he gave up his throne to his son and stepped on to his own funeral pyre. The Shahis continued to fight the Turks but their power had reduced considerably. Over the next twenty-five years, Mahmud made seventeen raids into India, many of them directed at wealthy temple towns such as Mathura and Nagarkot. His most infamous raid was against the temple of Somnath, Gujarat, in 1026 CE. It is said that this attack left over fifty thousand people dead and about twenty million dirhams worth of gold, silver and gems were taken away. The Somnath temple has since been destroyed and rebuilt many times but it is Ghazni’s raid that is still remembered most vividly.

The Somnath temple as it stands today was built in the early 1950s. Its reconstruction was one of the first major projects started shortly after India became a republic. Standing right on the seashore, the temple is a wonderful place to watch the sun set. But something of Ghazni’s massacre still seems to linger in the air. Barely half a kilometre away is the spot where the Pandava warrior arjuna is said to have conducted the last rites of Krishna. Three rivers meet in the sea here—one of them is named Saraswati. The Turks were eager to gain wealth and spread their religion but there was also another important interest they had in mind—the capture of slaves. Over the next few centuries, hundreds of thousands of Indian slaves— particularly from West Punjab and Sind—were marched into Afghanistan and were then sold in the bazaars of Central Asia and the Middle east. They were unused to the extreme cold of the Afghan mountains and died in such large numbers that the range came to be known as the Hindukush or the ‘Killer of Hindus’. These raids and invasions were not met with a strong response as there would have been in the times of the Mauryans or the Guptas. The last great Hindu empire of North India—that of the Gurjara-Pratiharas—was reduced in power and the heart of the civilization had shifted south to the Vindhyas. The most powerful Indian kingdom of that time was that of the Cholas, who ruled in the far south and were not much concerned with what was happening in the North West. Meanwhile, freed from the political and cultural domination of the Gangetic plains, central India experienced a cultural and economic boom. This was the age of the remarkable Raja Bhoj, the warrior-scholar who ruled much of central India and of the Chandelas of Bundelkhand, who built the temples of Khajuraho. Raja Bhoj is not given much importance by historians but central India is full of stories and ballads about him. How much of these are true? It’s hard to say but one cannot deny his importance to this region. Raja Bhoj rebuilt

the Somnath temple, fought against many Turkish raids and built one of the largest forts in the world at Mandu in Madhya Pradesh. But the most visible of his achievements is the huge lake that he created using an earthen dam in Bhopal, a city that is named after him. Before the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984, the city was best known for this body of water. It shows the skills of the medieval engineers. The lake still stands, after all these years, proving that big dams work well in the Malwa plateau unlike the Himalayas where tectonics and silt can make them risky to build. Farther north, the Chandelas of Bundelkhand, who once used to submit to the Gurjara-Pratiharas, carved out a small but powerful kingdom for themselves after the latter lost their powers in the tenth century. They celebrated their successes by building the famous temple of Khajuraho, which is now a UNESCO World heritage Site. The Kandariya Mahadev temple, the largest in the complex, is said to have been built after the Chandelas fended off Mahmud Ghazni himself! There are many striking sculptures in Khajuraho that depict lions or lion-like dragons. Many of them are shown locked in combat with a Chandela king or warrior, including female warriors. Just like the Mauryans, the Chandelas also liked to use the lion as a symbol of power. There are no tigers anywhere among the sculptures, but the Panna Tiger Reserve is just a twenty-minute drive away from Khajuraho. Was this a region dominated by lions in those times? Or did the Chandelas simply think that tigers were not symbolic of royal power? For a century and half after Mahmud’s raids, the Turks were mostly restricted to West Punjab. But in 1192, Muhammad Ghori defeated Prithviraj Chauhan, the Rajput king of Delhi and Ajmer, in the Second Battle of Tarain (150 km from Delhi in the modern state of Haryana). The Turks occupied Delhi and then invaded the rest of India. By 1194, Varanasi and Kannauj were captured and ransacked. Kannauj never really

recovered from this attack. Within a few years, the University of Nalanda was destroyed by Bakhtiyar Khilji. Its library was torched and most of its scholars were put to death. While there were many Brahmin scholars at Nalanda, most of them who were killed were probably Buddhist monks. Some of those who survived stayed on but most fled to Tibet where they continued following their traditions till the chinese takeover of the mid-twentieth century. After Nalanda, Bakhtiyar Khilji attacked and completely destroyed Vikramshila, another famous Buddhist university. Buddhism was already losing its influence in the subcontinent and these attacks led to its collapse. In 1235, Sultan Iltutmish attacked Ujjain, once the secondary capital of the Guptas and a major centre for the study of mathematics, literature, astronomy and Hindu philosophy. It was around the same time that these universities were being destroyed that the University of Oxford was being established on the other side of the planet. By the end of the thirteenth century, armies led by generals like Malik Kafur made raids into the deep south. This was a bloody period in Indian history—ancient cities, universities and temples were ravaged and millions were probably killed. And so ended the second cycle of urbanization that had begun in the Gangetic plains during the Iron age. Some sparks from the old times remained alive in the city of Vijayanagar in the far South and in the even more faraway kingdoms of South East Asia. However, India was starting on a new cycle of urbanization which was influenced a great deal by Central Asia and Persia. This book can’t go into all of it in detail, so we will look at the next cycle of urbanization largely through the evolution of its most prominent city—Delhi. MANY, MANY DELHIS People have been living in and around Delhi from the Stone age—tools and other objects made of stone have been found in the ridges of the Aravalli range. The Rig Vedic people would have been familiar with this region

since it is in the Eastern corner of the Sapta-Sindhu. Remains from the late Harappan Age have also been found here. It could be that this was one of the places where the Harappans settled when the Saraswati dried up. Since this time, cities have been built, abandoned, destroyed, and rebuilt many times. Some say Delhi has been built eight times. Others say the number is sixteen. In the last 150 years alone we have seen a full cycle. After Delhi was sacked by the British in 1858, its urban population fell to a mere 1,54,417 people. Today, the National Capital Region is home to twenty million people and it is growing rapidly. The terms ‘Old Delhi’ and ‘New Delhi’ have meant different things at different points in time. When William Sleeman visited the city in 1836, he called Shahjehanabad what we now call ‘Old Delhi’,‘New Delhi’. To him, Old Delhi was the ruins that were scattered from Mehrauli to Purana Qila—the area that we now call New Delhi! As we discussed in Chapter 3, many of the events of the Mahabharata are said to have happened in the area around Delhi. Indraprastha, the capital of the Pandavas, was situated in Delhi along the banks of the Yamuna. Archaeological excavations inside the Purana Qila fort, under which this site was believed to have been, bear evidence of a late Iron Age settlement. The settlement seems to have been occupied till the Gupta period. There is a small museum in Purana Qila which displays photographs and artefacts from the excavations. However, it is impossible to prove that this was indeed the city mentioned in the epic. Nothing found so far obviously matches the descriptions of Indraprastha. There is no palace or audience hall that would have made the Kauravas jealous. It could be that archaeologists have not yet found it or that they were swept away by a flood on the Yamuna. But what we can say is that Delhi was an important settlement from very ancient times. An Ashokan rock inscription discovered near the Kalkaji temple in

1996 suggests that Delhi may have included several habitations other than just the one at Purana Qila. The first Delhi of which we know was built by the Tomar Rajputs. They made it their headquarters in the eighth century. Their first settlement was at Suraj Kund in the extreme south of Delhi. Water supply was a big concern then (as it is now) and a large stone dam that was built by the Tomars still stands. The nearby village of Anangpur recalls the name of Raja Anang Pal, a Tomar king. A stream from the dam feeds a stepped tank that was probably linked to a temple of the sun god—hence the name Suraj Kund or Pool of the Sun. The lake is often dry now because of urbanization and illegal quarrying. In the eleventh century, the Tomars moved farther west and constructed a large fort—Lal Kot or the Red Fort. Shah Jehan’s seventeenth-century Red Fort was not the first to have that name. To mark his place in history, Anang Pal also added his name to the Iron Pillar. A century later, the Chauhans of Ajmer took control of the city and further expanded it. It now came to be called Qila Rai Pithora and was the capital of Prithviraj Chauhan. Large sections of the walls of this city can still be seen near Mehrauli village though almost nobody visits them. From the top of the walls, you can see towers and other structures including a major gateway. The urban landscape of Delhi can be seen beyond the trees even as the Qutub Minar looks on sternly. When the Turks captured Rai Pithora, they made it their Indian headquarters and began to remodel it for their own use. The Qutub Minar complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has some of the oldest Islamic buildings in northern India. At its centre is the mosque built by Ghori’s slave-general, Qutubuddin Aibak. An inscription to the East gate of the mosque says that it was built on the remains of twenty-seven demolished Hindu-Jain temples. Destroyed idols can still be seen among the columns. The Iron Pillar, However, continued to stand on one side of the mosque courtyard. Was it that the new rulers wanted to use this ancient symbol of power for themselves? It is also possible that Qutubuddin wanted to let it

stand in the shadow of his own great pillar—the Qutub Minar, a 72.5m-high stone. The Qutub Minar is a truly impressive structure even by modern standards. When the Moroccan traveller Ibn Batuta visited Delhi over a century later, he was stunned by the height of the tower as well the unique metallurgy of the pillar. He tells us that a later sultan wanted to build a tower twice as high but the project was abandoned. The remains of that sultan’s attempt still stand. The sultan was Alauddin Khilji. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Alauddin Khilji built the new fort of Siri at the site of a military camp North-East of the existing city. The main urban centre continued to be in the old city but the sultan, who was worried that he would be assassinated, felt safer within the new fort. But a few years after it had been built, Siri was raided by the Mongols. Alauddin managed to push the Mongols back and then took care to make the fort stronger. This was a wise move because the Mongols were soon back! They succeeded in capturing the main city and looted it. However, Alauddin was safe in Siri for months till the Mongols decided to return.

There are only a few stretches of walls and other buildings that remain of Siri now. Its site is now occupied by the urban village of Shahpur Jat. This is one of the many villages that live on in modern Delhi and is now dotted with many small offices and designer workshops. The rest of Siri is covered by the Asian Games Village that was built to house athletes for the event in 1982. As we’ve seen, water supply has always been a major problem in Delhi. In Khilji’s times, he built a large reservoir called Hauz Khas which still exists and is surrounded by a beautiful park. Overlooking the reservoir are the remains of an old Madrassa (Islamic religious school) built by a later sultan, and the urban village of Hauz Khas. Since the 1990s, this village has changed a lot. Now, there are a number of expensive boutiques and trendy bars there—pretty ironic because Alauddin was a severe man who strictly controlled the prices of all goods and did not permit the buying or sale of alcohol! The Khilji dynasty did not survive for long after Alauddin. It was replaced by another dynasty of Turks—the Tughlaqs. The Tughlaqs also decided to build a new city called Tughlaqabad and chose a location to the East of the existing city.

It is unclear why the first Tughlaq sultan wanted to build yet another city. Why did he choose this particular location? Was it just to satisfy his ego? There is a story that he did this because the sultan used to be just a nobleman serving the Khiljis once upon a time. He had suggested to the then king that this would be a good place to build a city and the king had sarcastically answered, ‘When you are Sultan, build it.’ And that’s just what the first Tughlaq Sultan did! Although overgrown and encroached upon, the extensive fortifications and other remains of Tughlaqabad are still very impressive. A secret entrance to the palace, with elaborate passageways, hidden storage rooms and disguised entry and exit, were discovered in the 1990s. The exit is a small opening on the outer wall which looks like a drain. However, though the city looks impressive, it was occupied only for a few years. Probably because of water supply problems! Muhammad Tughlaq was the second sultan of this dynasty. He decided to shift his capital a thousand kilometres south to Daulatabad in 1326 CE. The fort was located in a strategically crucial position on the Southern Road or Dakshina Path. It would be easy to make raids from here into southern India. The sultan’s decision made sense but he also insisted that every single person living in the old capital move with him. There is a terrible tale of how an old beggar who couldn’t make the journey was tied to a cart and dragged along for forty days. Obviously, he did not reach the new capital alive. After putting the people through such trouble, the sultan changed his mind! The entire population was then made to walk back to Delhi, the old capital. Muhammad decided to expand Delhi and invited settlers from the rest of his empire and from Central Asia. He built a set of walls that connected the old city of Lal Kot with the Khilji fortress of Siri. This was a very large area and it would become the next city of Delhi—Jahanpanah. The older cities continued to have people living in them even as capitals shifted. Even some parts of the abandoned Tughlaqabad were used for

storage and to house soldiers. Jahanpanah probably contained open areas and even farming communities within the walls. A massive new palace- complex was built. It is all of this that Ibn Batuta saw when he visited Delhi. Ibn Batuta is one of the greatest travel writers of all time. Originally from Tangier in Morocco, he travelled across the known world through North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and India, and eventually to China. He then made his way back to Morocco before orally recording the story of an adventure that had lasted for almost thirty years. When he arrived in Delhi, Muhammad Tughlaq ruled from his new palace in Jahanpanah. This was the time when the sultan was trying to build up the prestige of his court by bringing in learned Muslim scholars. Ibn Batuta thus became part of the court. Batuta has left us a very vivid description of the Tughlaq court. One had to pass through three gates to enter the sultan’s audience hall. There was a platform in front of the first gate where the executioners sat. When a man was sentenced to death, he would be executed outside this gate and his body would be left there for three days as a warning to others. At the first gate sat a number of trumpeters and pipe-players. Whenever an important person came, they would blow the trumpets and loudly announce the person’s name. Between the first and second gates, there were platforms occupied by large numbers of palace guards. At the second gate sat the royal ushers in gilded caps, the chief usher wielding a golden mace. Inside this gate was a large reception hall where people could sit as they waited for their turn. The visitor would then walk up to the third and final gate where scribes entered the person’s name, time of arrival and other details. A nobleman who didn’t attend the court for more than three days without a valid reason was not allowed beyond this point without the sultan’s permission. Beyond this gate was the main audience hall, a large wooden structure of ‘a thousand pillars’. The sultan sat on a raised throne supported by cushions. An attendant stood behind the king and flicked away the flies that may dare to disturb him! and there probably were many flies—you cannot leave dead bodies

lying around the front porch for days and not expect pests! In front of the sultan were the members of the royal family, the nobility, the religious leaders, the judiciary and so on. Each person was given a position according to their status. When the sultan arrived and sat down, the whole court rose and shouted ‘Bismillah!’ a hundred of his armed personal guards stood on either side of the throne. Clearly, the sultan was taking no chances. Most of the nobility and senior officials were foreigners—Turks but also Khurasanis, Egyptians, Syrians and so on. Ibn Batuta says that Muhammad Tughlaq always gave the high positions to foreigners. This was not unusual. The Turks were an army of occupiers and the Indians—both Hindus and local Muslims—would have been treated with contempt. Indians were probably allowed into the walls of medieval Delhi only as slaves and menial workers. This attitude only changed under the Afghan Suris in the mid-1500s and became a common practice under Mughal emperor Akbar. It was a slow change. Even under Akbar, most of the nobility was foreign- born.

From time to time, the Tughlaq sultan held banquets. All the guests were seated by rank. Each person was first given a cup of ‘candy-water’ and they had to drink this before they began the meal. Then the food was brought from the kitchen in a procession headed by the Chief Usher carrying a golden mace and his deputy holding a silver mace. As they walked by, they would cry out ‘Bismillah!’ and what was the food like? There were rounds of unleavened bread, roast meats, chicken, rice, sweets and . . . samosas! after the meal, each person was given a tin cup of barley water for the stomach. After this, everyone got paan (betel leaves and areca nuts). When it was all done, the chamberlains cried ‘Bismillah!’ and everyone stood up.

We are not sure where exactly Muhammad Tughlaq’s palace stood but the most likely place is the ruins of Bijay Mandal, quite close to IIT Gate. Very few tourists today visit the site. Just behind the Bijay Mandal complex is the Begumpur Mosque which may have once been the imperial mosque. Ibn Batuta became afraid of the sultan over time. He eventually attached himself to an embassy to China and fled the country. But as the embassy made its way south, it was repeatedly attacked by bandits. Ibn Batuta was captured and almost killed but was finally set free. The fact that even an imperial embassy was not spared by bandits on a major highway tells us how chaotic things had become under Turkic rule. After many more adventures, Ibn Batuta reached China. But though he is still famous in the Arab world, apart from historians and scholars, his adventures are barely remembered in India. His memory is now limited to a mention in a somewhat silly but popular Hindi song about his shoe! The Tughlaq dynasty had built three capitals by now—Tughlaqabad, Daulatabad and Jahanpanah. But they were still not satisfied! Feroze Shah Tughlaq, who came after Muhammad, was an even more enthusiastic builder. He constructed many new structures as well as repaired many of the old ones. He also extended the city northwards by building a fortified palace-complex along the Yamuna called Feroze Shah Kotla. The ruins of Feroze Shah Kotla are now near the busy ITO crossing, just behind the offices of India’s leading newspapers. The architects of later Delhi often took their building material from this structure but the site still contains a three-storeyed pavilion topped by the Ashokan pillar that had been carefully brought here by the Sultan. The complex is said to be inhabited by djinns (spirits), and people, mostly Sufi Muslims, often come here and light lamps to console them and also ask for favours. You can see small offerings and walls blackened by the smoke from the lamps. Some of the believers tie colourful strings to the grill put up by the Archaeological Survey to protect the Ashokan pillar—modern Indians thus pay their respect to an ancient imperial pillar in order to communicate with medieval spirits!

Feroze Shah came to the throne when he was almost a middle-aged man and he ruled till his death. He died after several years of illness at the age of eighty-one. As with Ashoka, his empire was already weakening towards the end and he was followed by rulers who could not manage the empire effectively. The Turko-Mongol raider Taimur the lame (also known as Tamerlane) took this opportunity to sweep into the country from Central Asia in 1398. He defeated the Sultan’s army easily and entered Delhi. He spared Muslim territories but everything else was looted or destroyed. The entire Hindu population was either killed or taken away as slaves. Taimur later wrote in his diary, ‘I was desirous of sparing them but could not succeed as it is the will of God that this calamity should befall this city.’ Somehow, this logic isn’t very convincing, is it? After Taimur’s attack, Vijayanagar, in the far south, became the most important city in India for the next one and a half centuries. We’ll talk about this later. Meanwhile, the Tughlaqs were followed by other minor dynasties. Much of their empire was gone but Delhi’s urban habitations continued to enjoy political and economic importance. Like every dynasty that has ruled this city before and after, the rulers of this period also built grand memorials to themselves—the Lodhi Gardens is one such example. Now, the rich and powerful of modern India come here for their walks and to discuss world affairs. It is also a good place for birdwatching. In 1526, a Turko-Mongol adventurer called Babur defeated the Sultan of Delhi in what we call the First Battle of Panipat. We know a lot about Babur because he kept a fascinating diary called the Tuzuk-i-Baburi, written in Turkish. Babur was a direct descendent of Ghengis Khan from his mother’s side and Taimur the lame on his father’s side. However, Taimur’s empire had been largely lost by the time Babur was born. At the age of twelve, Babur inherited a tiny kingdom in the beautiful Ferghana valley in Central Asia. It could barely support an army of three to four thousand men but even with this small military force, he tried to capture Taimur’s capital of Samarkhand many times. He even managed to do it for a brief while but couldn’t hold on to it. The Uzbeks chased him out of there and he made his way south with a

small band of followers. He won and lost many battles along the way till he gained control of Kabul. And then, he began to look towards India. It was a daring ambition because his army was much smaller than the Sultan’s, but Babur had a secret weapon— matchlock guns. This was the first time that guns would be used in north India. Babur defeated the Sultan and quickly went on to beat all other rivals, including the Rajputs. And thus began the Mughal (i.e. Mongol) empire in India. The dynasty did not call itself the Mughals though. The name they preferred was ‘Gurkhani’— which comes from ‘Gurkhan’ or ‘son-in-law’. Taimur liked to call himself by this name after he was married to a princess from the Ghengiz Khan dynasty. Ghengiz or Chengiz Khan was the founder of the Mongol empire, one of the largest in history. He united the nomadic Mongol tribes and carried out a number of brutal invasions. The Mongols would eventually come to control lands from Eastern Europe and Iran, across Central Asia, to China. Although Babur had finally conquered this region, what he really wanted was Samarkhand. He did not think very highly of India. In his opinion, Hindustan ‘is a place of little charm. There is no beauty in its people, no graceful social intercourse, no poetic talent or understanding, no etiquette, nobility or manliness. The arts and crafts have no harmony or symmetry. There are no good horses, meat, grapes, melons, or other fruits. There is no ice, cold water, good food or bread in the markets.’ Then why did Babur invade India at all? He’s quite honest about it: ‘The one nice aspect of Hindustan is that it is a large country with lots of gold and money.’ Babur died less than five years after he came to India. After him came his son Humayun, who started the construction of the next Delhi—Dinpanah. Built just south of Feroze Shah Kotla, along the river Yamuna, it included a Citadel that we now know as Purana Qila (or Old Fort). As we have discussed, this is said to be the site of ancient Indraprastha but there is

nothing to suggest that this is why Humayun chose this place. In addition to the Citadel, there was a fortified city. Not much has survived of Dinpanah except one of its impressive gates—the Lal Darwaza (Red Gate). You can see this massive structure across the road from Purana Qila and Delhi Zoo. But Humayun did not complete either Dinpanah or Purana Qila. He was chased out by a group of Afghan rebels led by Sher Shah Suri. He escaped with his family to Persia and it was Sher Shah Suri who completed the construction of Purana Qila. Though he ruled for a short time, Sher Shah Suri introduced many vital changes. He reorganized tax collection, minted the first silver Rupiya (the earliest version of the modern Indian rupee) and revived the ancient city of Pataliputra (Patna). He also rebuilt the ancient Uttara Path highway from Punjab to Bengal. Known as Sadak-e-Azam (or Great Road), it became a major artery of the Mughal period. The British called it the Grand Trunk Road which, as we know, is now part of the Golden Quadrilateral. Sher Shah Suri died in a gunpowder-related accident just after five years on the throne. Humayun came back and reoccupied Delhi. But it seemed as if Sher Shah Suri’s bad luck had followed him, too. On one fateful day, Humayun went to watch the rise of Venus from the roof of his library. On his way down the steep stairs, he tripped on his robe and died from the fall. Humayun’s library building is still there in Purana Qila. The stairway also exists but is not open to the public. With humyaun’s death, thirteen-year-old Akbar became the new ruler. He is usually called the third Mughal Emperor but it was actually he who created the foundations of a stable empire. Apart from continuing with the changes introduced by Sher Shah Suri, he attempted to improve relationships with the Hindus living in his empire in the second half of his reign. This was a huge step forward. From the writings of Muslim writers of that time as well as from the ways in which the Hindus responded to the Turkish invaders, it is clear that Delhi’s rulers before Akbar regarded themselves as foreign occupiers. Thus, Hindu rulers, especially the Rajputs, saw themselves in perpetual conflict with the Delhi sultans. For example, the rajput rulers of Mewar did not just

see themselves just as kings but as the custodians or guardians of the Hindu civilization embodied in the temple of Eklingji. The deity Shiva was considered to be the real king of Mewar, which is why the rulers did not call themselves ‘Maharaja’ or Great King. They called themselves Rana which means ‘Custodian’ or ‘Prime Minister’. Mewar suffered huge losses and faced extreme hardship but its rulers still did not give up their fight against the sultans. On three different occasions, its capital Chittaur was defended to the last man and even after the capital fell, the fight continued in the hills. The shrine of Eklingji is less than an hour’s drive from Udaipur. It is a thousand-year-old temple complex wedged into a hillside. The complex is heavily fortified. The fortifications of Chittaur, Kumbhagarh and even Udaipur are within a few hours’ drive. Mewar must have been the most militarized place in the medieval world. This was a population that was willing to fight to the death. By Akbar’s time, However, everyone was tired of the fighting that had been going on for centuries. Thinkers like Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh tradition, had already argued that both civilizations must learn to accommodate their differences. Emperor Akbar was probably liberal by nature but his thoughts also evolved with time. The change may have happened with the siege of Chittaur, the capital of Mewar in 1568. The fort fell after many months. Almost every soldier was killed. The women killed themselves in a ritual suicide. Akbar further killed 20,000 people—unarmed civilians. Like Ashoka, eighteen centuries earlier, he may have been shocked by the bloodshed he had created. After this, Akbar began to think about reconciling the two cultures. In 1555, the Mughal nobility or Omrah consisted of fifty-one foreign-born Muslims (Uzbeks, Persians, Turks, Afghans). By 1580, there were 222 in this group but it included forty-three Rajputs and a similar number of Muslims. Not everyone was happy about this. On the one hand, the orthodox Muslims thought Akbar was being too liberal. The rulers of

Mewar were still suspicious of his motives and kept up their resistance. The ballads of how Rana Pratap and his army of Bhil tribesmen fought the Mughals can still be heard in the Aravallis of Mewar. His coat of armour and that of his horse Chetak are prominently displayed in the Udaipur City Palace Museum. It took more than a generation before Mewar accepted a more friendly relationship with the Mughals. Akbar shifted the capital south from Delhi to Agra and then to a newly built city called Fatehpur Sikri. This city took fifteen years to build but was abandoned after only fourteen years because of water scarcity—just like Tughlaqabad. The capital was moved back to Agra. Meanwhile, Delhi remained an important city but it was only a century later, after Akbar’s grandson built Shahjehanabad (Old Delhi), that it would regain its full glory. Akbar did build something grand in Delhi—his father’s tomb. The architecture of Humayun’s Tomb is not as well-known as that of the Taj Mahal but it is an impressive building by any standard. It’s not that medieval India was only about the building, abandoning, destruction and rebuilding of cities. Most of the population lived in rural areas. Babur tells us that Indian villagers rarely spent any effort in either irrigation or in building permanent homes. Instead, they were always prepared to abandon their villages and take refuge in the forests. This is how common people coped with repeated invasions and war. Much of the country was covered with forests and may have even turned to jungle again after people fled their settlements. There were forests just outside Delhi where the rulers hunted within a few hours’ ride from the city walls. Feroze Shah even built a number of hunting lodges along the Aravalli ridges, including one in what is now the urban village of Mahipalpur, very close to the international airport. Deer, leopards and possibly lions were found where bright neon lights now announce budget hotels. British records say that the ‘Hurriana lion’ was seen here as late as the 1820s.

A LION IN THE BUSH Babur’s diary tells us that he didn’t think much of the people of India but he was very impressed by the flora and fauna of the country. He spent many pages describing the peacocks, elephants and river dolphins. He was particularly interested in the rhinoceros that he came across in the forests near Peshawar. It’s interesting that rhinos were found so far to the west in the sixteenth century. They are now found only in the swampy grasslands of Assam, North Bengal and Nepal’s Terai regions. Oddly, Babur does not talk

about the big cats. He probably had seen lions and cheetahs in Afghanistan and north-Eastern Iran and did not think they were uniquely Indian. The Mughals were big hunters and their adventures are recorded in several writings and paintings. They hunted a wide range of animals like nilgai, blackbuck, birds and, of course, lions. There are relatively fewer accounts and paintings related to hunting tigers. This may be because the Mughals mostly did their hunting in the north-west of the country which had lions and not tigers. We know that there were important hunting grounds near Agra, Delhi, and Bhatinda in Punjab. Most of these places are now thickly populated and farmed but in those times, there were large expanses of uncultivated Land near Delhi and Agra as well as on the road to Lahore. These large areas were available to wildlife and several tracts were meant only for the royal hunt. The lion continued to symbolize the power of the State. Only the king and members of the royal family could hunt the animal. Others had to take special permission. There are many stories about Akbar’s lion hunts. Once, in 1568, Akbar went hunting in the Mewat region near Alwar, south of Gurgaon. A lion was spotted and was quickly killed by a hail of arrows shot by his companions. Akbar was annoyed. He issued an order that if another lion were to show up, he would shoot it himself. Another one did come by and Akbar shot it in the eye with an arrow. The wounded animal charged but Akbar could not get a good shot at it though he’d dismounted from his horse. In his excitement, one of the courtiers shot an arrow which further angered the animal and it mauled the man! In the end, the lion had to be finished off by other courtiers. Akbar was very fond of hunting and was willing to take personal risks, too. In his younger days, he would hunt on horseback or even on foot. He used a large number of trained cheetahs to keep him in the chase. Later in life, he kept a stable of a thousand cheetahs! Over time, However, the emperors got used to hunting from sitting on an elephant’s back and hunting with guns—

far safer and more accurate. In a single hunting expedition to rupbas near Agra in February–March 1610, Jehangir, who succeeded Akbar, and his companions killed seven lions, seventy nilgai, fifty-one blackbucks, eighty- two other animals, 129 birds and 1023 fish—all within fifty-six days! On a hunt in 1610 in Bari near Agra, one of emperor Jehangir’s courtiers, Anup Rai, came across a half-eaten cow and traced a lion to a thicket. The animal was surrounded and Jehangir was informed. He rushed to the spot and tried to shoot the animal—and missed! The lion charged and the emperor’s followers panicked. They ran helter-skelter, even trampling the emperor in their hurry. Anup Rai saved Jehangir’s life by battling the lion to the ground with his bare hands till Prince Khurram killed it with a sword. A Hindu Rajput was not just allowed to accompany the royal family on a hunt but was willing to risk his life for a Muslim king—Taimur’s descendant, no less. This shows how much the relations between Hindus and Muslims had improved after Akbar. Jehangir gave Anup Rai the title Ani Rai Singhdalan —commander of Troops and Lion Crusher. A few years after this, the first English ambassador arrived at the Mughal court. Sir Thomas Roe was a distinguished diplomat and was in India from 1615 to 1619. He became a close friend of Jehangir’s. However, this did not mean that he could kill lions freely. In 1617, a lion and a wolf made nightly raids on Roe’s camp near Mandu and killed a number of his sheep and goats. He was not allowed to hurt the animals and he had to ask Jehangir for special permission. The permission was eventually given but the lion escaped. The wolf was not as lucky. Roe says that the symbol of the lion was very important to the royals. One of the royal standards had a lion and the rising sun. The Shahs of Iran as well as the Hindu tradition in the subcontinent shared this love for the lion symbol. The Mughals knew that they were inheriting an ancient imperial dream—Emperor Jehangir inserted his own inscription in Persian on the Mauryan pillar in Allahabad. Thus, the column has inscriptions by three of India’s most powerful emperors—Ashoka, Samudragupta and Jehangir—a continuity across eighteen centuries! Why? Whether you take Jehangir’s inscription to the Mauryan pillar or the effort to link Akbar to

Kalhana’s history of Kashmir, the Mughals were trying to build the foundations of their empire in India—as part of the Indian Civilization, not an intrusion of it. This was a big shift from how earlier Delhi sultans saw themselves. THE ARABS RULE THE SEAS While all these invasions were going on, trade in the Indian Ocean continued to flourish. Marco Polo as well as Ibn Batuta had talked about this. However, the role of the Indians in the trade began to change from the end of the twelfth century. Indian merchants had once been explorers and risk-takers who criss-crossed the oceans in their stitched ships. They could be found in large numbers in ports from the Persian Gulf to China. Buddhist and Brahmin scholars sailed in large numbers to South East Asia where people welcomed them eagerly. But suddenly, a little over a century after the Chola naval raids on Srivijaya, they almost disappeared. What happened? Around this time, the caste system in India became more rigid and there was a rule that prohibited people from crossing the seas. But this was only a reflection of something larger. There seems to have been a shift in India’s attitude towards risk-taking and innovation—a closing of the mind. There are many signs of this that we can see in the culture and civilization of that time. Sanskrit, which used to be a language that changed and grew with the times, stopped taking in new words and usages. Sanskrit literature became obsessed with ‘purity’. Scientific progress came to a halt as people began focusing more on learned knowledge rather than experimentation.

Al-Biruni, who visited India around the same time that Mahmud Ghazni was making his infamous raids, commented that Indian scholars were so full of themselves that they were unwilling to learn anything from the rest of the world. He also contrasted this attitude with that of the earlier generation of Indians. Given these changes, Indian merchants chose to remain on the shores while shipping was taken over by the arabs. There were also Jews, Persians and Chinese traders. Ibn Batuta noticed a number of Chinese ships in calicut (Kozhikode) and he describes a military junk that must have been accompanied by a merchant fleet. It was large enough to accommodate a thousand men, six hundred sailors and four hundred men-at-arms. It’s clear that Ibn Batuta was looking at a very active trading network on his journeys. There was so much going and coming in this network that he once met a man from ceuta, a city very close to his hometown of Tangier, first in Delhi and then again in China. He may have been the one to write about his travels but the routes he took were well known to Arab merchants. The spirit of ancient India was kept alive for several more centuries by the kingdoms of South East Asia. Angkor remained the capital of the Khmer Empire till it was sacked by the Thais in 1431. Its ruins must be seen to be believed—especially angkor Wat, the largest Hindu temple in the world. The remains of the kingdom of Champa in Vietnam are equally interesting. The kingdom flourished till its capital Vijaya was sacked by Viet troops in 1471. A smaller Cham kingdom limped along till it, too, was overrun in the late seventeenth century. Hindu temples built by the Chams are still scattered across Vietnam—a few are used by the tiny Balamon Cham community that continues to practise Hinduism (they number around 30,000). Sadly, the most important cluster of cham temples in My Son was heavily bombed by the americans during the Vietnam War. The site is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site but there is very little to see. The small museum at the entrance has some pre-war photographs that provide an idea about how glorious it used to be once.

Java was another important hub of Indian culture. In the fourteenth century, the Majapahits of Java had established direct or indirect control over much of what is now Indonesia. As they expanded, they pushed out the ancient Srivijaya kingdom based in Sumatra. A naval raid on the Srivijaya capital of Palembang in 1377 finally got rid of their main rival in the region. One of the Srivijaya princes, Sang Nila Utama, is said to have escaped to the riau cluster of islands, just south of the Malay peninsula to escape from the Majapahits. One day, so the story goes, he had gone hunting on the island of Temasek where he is said to have seen a lion. So, when he built a settlement here, he named is Singapura or Lion city. And that’s how Singapore got its name! However, the animal the prince had seen must have been a Malayan tiger and not a lion. The last wild tiger of Singapore was killed in the 1930s in the neighbourhood of Choa Chu Kang. One of Sang Nila Utama’s successors, Parmeswara, seems to have found it difficult to stay in Singapore because of local rivalries and the continued threat from the Javans. He moved farther north and established his headquarters at Melaka (or Malacca). This is what South East Asia looked like when Admiral Zheng he arrived with the Chinese ‘treasure fleet’. Zheng He was a Muslim eunuch from Yunan. He had been brought as a boy prisoner to the Ming court and castrated. He went on to lead seven major naval expeditions between 1405 and 1433 that visited South East Asia, India, Sri Lanka, Arabia and East Africa. The ‘treasure-fleets’ were quite remarkable. There were over a hundred ships and tens of thousands of men. Chinese naval technology at this stage was centuries ahead of the rest of the world. In recent years, some authors have argued that Zheng he may have even visited the americas. He had the technology to undertake such a voyage but it’s unlikely that he actually made the journey across the Pacific.

These naval expeditions were taken for many reasons, including trade and exploration. However, the main goal was to show how powerful China was. The Chinese had defeated the Mongols just a few decades earlier and they were keen to flaunt their importance to the rest of the world. If the sheer size of the fleet did not impress the locals, Zheng He was willing to take military action as he did in a civil war in Sri Lanka. Around this time, there were already a number of chinese settlements in South East Asia but the Majapahit Empire of Java was the most powerful. A century earlier, they had defeated the Chinese and the Mongols who tried to control the region. In 1378, the Ming emperor tried to install his candidate on the Srivijaya throne. The Majapahit, annoyed by this interference, simply killed the envoys sent by the emperor. Zheng He would have been aware of this history. He had a plan to neutralize the Majapahit—supporting Parameswara’s new kingdom in Melaka. A large Chinese settlement was created in Melaka and Parameswara personally visited the Ming court. The Chinese encouraged the Melakkans to convert to Islam. Zheng he and many of his commanders were Muslims but he probably did this for political reasons too—the Javans he was trying to defeat were Hindus and it is even possible that the Chinese wanted to reduce the risk of Indians once again influencing this region. The

Chinese of this period were very conscious of themselves as a nation and wanted to impress everyone with their power. The Chinese strategy led to the steady Islamization of South East Asia. Melaka boomed while Majapahit slowly lost its powers and the last of the Majapahit princes escaped to the small island of Bali where their descendants continue to live and practise Hinduism. The network of Chinese merchants survived European colonization and they are still an important part of business in the region. The Chinese domination of the seas, However, came to a sudden end. The mandarin officials in Beijing decided that the voyages were too expensive and not worth it. The treasure fleets rotted and their records were suppressed. Like India, China also closed its mind. Technological superiority could not save them from the change in attitude. For a while, it seemed as if the Indian Ocean would be under the control of the Arabs once again but this was not to be. In december 1497, a small Portuguese fleet rounded the Cape of Good hope and sailed boldly into the Indian Ocean.

6 Where One-eyed Giants Roam A s we saw in Chapter 3, the people of the Iron Age knew a lot more about geography than the people of the Vedic Bronze Age. The epics clearly show that people knew about the far corners of the subcontinent. They had a fairly detailed knowledge of the terrain by the time of the Mauryan Empire. But, did ancient Indians try to create a map of the country? Over centuries of maritime trade, they would have come to know quite a lot about the geography of the Indian Ocean rim, even as far as the Chinese coast in the west and of the Red Sea in the east. At the same time, they were also quite used to expressing ideas in the form of diagrams, including architectural plans. Because of Aryabhatta, by the time of the Guptas, Indians knew that the world was spherical and even had a fairly accurate estimate of its circumference. Everything required for map-making or cartography was right there. We would expect that the Indians would have put together all this knowledge and mapped their country and the surrounding oceans. We would also think that they would have created maritime manuals just as the Greeks did (remember Periplus?) to help merchants and seamen. But there is nothing to show that ancient Indians ever attempted to map their country or write down what they knew about the geography of those times. A seaman’s manual written in the Kutchi dialect of Gujarat has been found but it exists as a relatively modern copy and nothing is known of its history. It is possible that such things existed but that they have been lost. This doesn’t mean that ancient Indians didn’t have a sense of geography. If anything, they were very aware of the layout of the subcontinent and, given their maritime activities, of the Indian Ocean rim. For example, when the famous eighth-century philosopher adi Shankaracharya set up four monasteries, he chose sites in the four corners of the country—Puri in the

east, Dwarka in the west, Sringeri in the south and Joshimath in the north. This is obviously not by chance. But it is probably true that map-making as a science was not very popular in ancient India. In contrast, the Arabs wrote several books on geography during the medieval period. They also preserved some of the works of classical scholars like Ptolemy of Alexandria at a time when Christian Europe was refusing to accept this knowledge because they thought it was ‘pagan’. In the twelfth century, the famous Moorish geographer, Al Idrisi, drew a map that combined his own knowledge with that of Ptolemy. It showed the Indian Ocean as landlocked, an idea that suited the Arabs because this would discourage the Europeans from finding a sea route to the east. By the fourteenth century, the Persians were drawing maps that show the Indian Peninsula. But the quality of map-making was quite basic. The real experts in this field were the Chinese. They’d been drawing maps of their own country for a long while. By the time of Admiral Zheng He, or perhaps because of his voyages, they had good strip maps of shipping routes through South East Asia and even parts of the East African coast. They are mostly in the nature of sailing instructions rather than accurate physical geography but they are quite detailed and advanced, compared to what the others had. In the meantime, Europe didn’t know anything about the geography of Asia. The Arabs seem to have made sure of that! With the works of classical geographers lost and memories of pre-Islamic trade with India fading, the Europeans didn’t have access to proper information. They were also fooled by frauds who exploited their ignorance to make a quick buck.

Sir John Mandeville was an English man who wrote a book full of fantastical tales called The Travels. He set off from St Albans in 1322 and returned to England thirty-four years later claiming to have visited India, China, Java, Sumatra and many other places. Geographers, kings and priests studied the book in detail and it was translated into almost every important European language. 300 handwritten copies of the book have survived in various libraries—four times as many as Marco Polo’s. According to Mandeville, there were women with dogs’ heads, one- eyed giants, geese with two heads, giant snails and other such beings in Asia. He added to the medieval belief that India was ruled by a powerful Christian king called Prester John by giving his own fanciful descriptions of this king and his activities. The Europeans who read this were happy, thinking they may have a Christian ally in the east.

Funnily enough, these lies had a profound impact on the history of the world. For example, Mandeville was one of the biggest fraudsters of his times but he claimed that his travels had proved that the world was round. This popularized the idea that it was possible to reach India by sailing west. Columbus planned his 1492 expedition after reading The Travels, and explorers like Raleigh read the book very carefully. Thus, one of the greatest events of history was based on an elaborate falsehood. Not all reports by European travellers were fictional. With the sudden expansion of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century, the control of the Arabs was finally broken and a few Europeans did travel to the east. The best known of them is Marco Polo. He is today remembered for his travels

along the Silk Route to China and his stay at the court of Kublai Khan. However, he returned home by the sea route through South East Asia around 1292. On the way, he visited the ports of southern India and wrote detailed descriptions of what he saw. He tells us of busy ports that exported pepper and imported horses, of Hindu temples and rituals, of diving for pearls, of a royal harem with 500 women, and even of a popular and wise queen who ruled an inland kingdom that produced diamonds—probably the Kakatiya queen Rudrama Devi of Golkonda. Polo’s facts and Mandeville’s fiction both fired the European imagination. The fifteenth century was the time of the Renaissance and European scholars opened their minds to the knowledge of classical civilizations. The works of Ptolemy gained importance again and attempts were made to draw maps of India based on his descriptions. The Ptolemaic maps are quite strange—since no maps had survived from the classical times, they were drawn just by reading a text! Therefore, the Ptolemaic maps miss out on basic facts that would have been quite obvious to Ptolemy himself—so much so that he didn’t dwell on them in his text. For example, the maps don’t show India’s coastline as a peninsula but as a long east-west coast. Besides, the texts were over a thousand years old by the time they were used to reconstruct India’s geography. And so, they marked places like Taxila although Taxila had disappeared over a millennium earlier! Such was the state of knowledge when the Portuguese decided to look for a way around Africa. GO, VASCO! The Portuguese were the first European country to make serious efforts to systematically map the world’s oceans. Prince Henry the Navigator, the king’s younger brother, became a patron of map-making and exploration. Through the fifteenth century, the Portuguese explored the west coast of Africa and established trading posts and refuelling points. They were quite unhappy when Spain backed Columbus who sailed west based on patchy

and wrong information, and yet ended up making one of the greatest ‘discoveries’ of history! So, they lobbied with the Pope to divide the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence. As per the Treaty of Tordesillas 1494, Spain was given a claim to all lands west of a meridian of longitude 370 leagues west of the cape Verde islands. All lands ‘discovered’ to the east belonged to Portugal. When it became clear that Columbus had actually not found a westward route to India, the Portuguese were relieved. They had learned from an earlier voyage led by Bartholomeu Dias that Africa could be rounded. A new expedition was prepared in 1497 under Vasco da Gama. It had three ships—the flagship San Gabriel, the smaller San Rafael and the traditional Barrio. an unarmed supply ship also accompanied these three ships part of the way. The ships would have been quite small and unsophisticated compared to those of Admiral Zheng He, but the Chinese had already withdrawn and were no longer a threat to the Portuguese. The ships set sail on 8 July 1497 and rounded the Cape of Good Hope by November. After this point, Vasco was in uncharted waters. As they sailed up the Mozambique coast, the Portuguese began to meet Arabic-speaking people. Vasco was quite pleased about this because it proved that he was indeed in the Indian Ocean. The Arabs had already established slaving ports along this coast and some of them had grown into large habitations.

However, no one in this part of the world expected the European ships to reach here. The Arabs at first thought that these fair-skinned people were Turks. The Portuguese had the advantage of having several Arabic speakers amongst them as the Iberian Peninsula had only just been liberated from Moorish rule. And so, they were able to talk to the locals and pretend to be fellow-Muslims. When asked by a local sheik for his copy of the Koran, Vasco lied saying he’d left it behind in his homeland near Turkey! This deception could not last forever and they were found out. The Portuguese fended off an attack and quickly sailed farther north in search of Kilwa, an island-city and port that was important enough to be known in Europe. However, they got lost and found themselves in Mombasa which was another port-city. Unfortunately, news of their deception had already made its way up the coast and the Portuguese narrowly escaped being trapped by the sultan of Mombasa. Vasco da Gama pushed farther north. Along the coast, he made enquiries about Christians and about the kingdom of Prester John. At last he reached the harbour of Malindi, a port that had been visited by the Chinese treasure fleet eighty years earlier and was the source of two giraffes that had been taken back to China. The ruler of Malindi knew who his guests really were but he needed allies against Mombasa and therefore decided to welcome the Portuguese. Alvaro Velho, one of Da Gama’s soldiers, has left us a description of the part-Arab, part-African world of the Swahili coast. The larger port-towns like Mombasa and Malindi had houses built of stone and lime. The population was mainly black African, with a ruling class of Arab origin. The merchants were mainly Arab but some Indians continued to visit these places despite the caste restrictions back home. Remains of this world can still be seen in the Stone Town of Zanzibar, Tanzania. The island of Zanzibar remained a major source of slaves bound for the Middle East till the nineteenth century. It continued to be ruled by an Omani Arab dynasty under British protection, till as recently as 1963. A community of Indian merchants had visited Zanzibar for a long time but under British protection, many more came to settle there. By the early

decades of the twentieth century, there was an active Indian community on the island. Freddie Mercury, singer of the band Queen, was born here into a Parsi family in 1947. His name at birth was Farrokh Balsara and the house where he spent the first few years of his life still stands in Stone Town. In a bloody revolution in 1963, however, the Arab dynasty was overthrown, thousands of Arabs and Indians were killed and the island soon became a semi-autonomous province of Tanzania. Still, a small Indian community lives in the narrow lanes of Stone Town, speaking the Kutchi dialect of Gujarat and worshipping in the few temples that still exist. There is something about Zanzibar that would remind you strongly of the old parts of Kochi and even of old Ahmedabad on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Maybe it’s the food, the smell of spices sold in the open, sailing dhows bobbing in the sea or just the weight of centuries of trade with India. In early 1498, Vasco da Gama had been trying to get a good pilot to guide his ships across the Indian Ocean but he was finding it difficult to find one. In Malindi, he got lucky and the sultan provided him with an experienced pilot described as a ‘Moor from Gujarat’. We’re not sure about who this pilot was—some say he was the famous Arab navigator Ibn Majid. But we don’t really know much other than the fact that he was called Malema Cana. Both the pilot and the weather proved to be good and the ships reached the Indian coast in just twenty-three days. The open port of Kozhikode (also called Calicut) was filled with vessels of different sizes and the beach was lined with shops and warehouses. Further inland was a large and grand city. The Portuguese ships attracted a lot of attention and the locals rowed up to them, women and children included, to have a closer look. The ruler of Calicut was Samudrin or Lord of the Sea (mispronounced as Zamorin). He lived in a large palace and was protected by ferocious

warriors of the Nair caste. The majority of the people were Hindu, but the Portuguese first thought they were just Christian people who were ill- informed and didn’t know any better. Their confusion was probably because of the legends of Prester John and because of the presence of the Syrian Christian community there. The Portuguese corrected their view later. They also noticed that maritime trade was dominated by a large and powerful community of Arab merchants who would not be pleased to see them. Vasco knew that he had to get back to Lisbon as soon as possible to tell everyone about his findings. The longer he stayed, the greater the danger! The Arabs were likely to trap him or turn the local ruler against him. And so, he went to the Samudri Raja and tried to make the best possible impression with gifts, claiming that he was all for peace. The Arabs did get the Nair guards to briefly hold Da Gama captive but he was soon freed and went back to Europe. Vasco was given a hero’s welcome in Lisbon. King Manuel lost no time in writing to the Spanish monarchs to inform them that the Portuguese half of the world contained India. He also assured them that India was densely populated by Christians. Just that they were not yet strong in faith! The Portuguese quickly followed up on their discovery. A fleet of thirteen ships and 1200 men were sent under the command of Pedro Alvares Cabral. They were heavily armed with cannon and guns—these

were still unknown in the Indian Ocean. By now, the Portuguese had found out that winds and ocean currents made it more efficient to first sail south- west and then turn East rather than hug the coast of Africa. The fleet swung so far west that they landed on the Brazil coast and claimed it for Portugal. Only a small part of Brazil actually fell within the Portuguese sphere as per the Treaty of Tordesillas, but maps were not too accurate then and the Portuguese grabbed more than ‘their’ share. The Spanish then took the Philippines which was clearly in the Portuguese sphere. Soon, the Treaty came to mean little because other Europeans joined the race. On reaching Calicut, cabral presented the Samudri Raja with many lavish gifts before demanding that they throw out the Arabs and trade only with the Portuguese. The king was stunned. While these talks were going on, a Meccan ship loaded with cargo prepared to leave for Aden. The Portuguese seized it, leading to riots in which a number of Portuguese men were killed. Cabral responded by lining up his ship and firing into the city. The Raja had to flee his palace. A number of merchant ships were seized and their sailors were burned alive in full view of the people watching from the shore. And that’s how the European domination of the Indian Ocean began. It would last till the middle of the twentieth century. Within a few decades, the Portuguese used their cannon to establish a string of outposts in the Indian Ocean. Control over Socotra and Muscat allowed them to control the Red Sea and Persian Gulf respectively. In 1510, they conquered Goa and a year later, a fleet sent out from Goa took over Melaka and established control over the key shipping route to the Spice Islands. Soon, the Portuguese had trading posts in Macau and Nagasaki. They maintained control over the seas with an iron fist and were extremely brutal and cruel in their dealings. They destroyed many Hindu temples and harassed the Syrian Christians for their faith. They did not spare the ships carrying Muslims for the Hajj and sometimes even burnt them mid-sea with the pilgrims on-board. The Sri Lankans—the Tamils and the Sinhalese—probably suffered the most because of the Portuguese. Much of the island was in a state of almost

constant war for one and a half centuries. Thankfully, the Portuguese did not have enough resources to try and conquer the entire subcontinent! Did you know? Portuguese control over the Indian Ocean was based on a network of forts along the coast. The best preserved of these forts is in Diu, a small island just off the Gujarat coast. Climbing its ramparts gives you a beautiful view of the Arabian Sea and of the impressive line of sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century cannon. There are few places in the world where you can see and touch such a large number of early cannon, their solid wood wheels bearing the marks left by centuries of rain and sun. In 1538, the Portuguese were able to defend Diu against a combined attack by the Sultan of Gujarat and a large fleet sent by the Ottoman Turks. A huge Ottoman cannon, cast in 1531 in Egypt, is the only one remaining of this failed Turkish expedition and can still be seen in Junagarh fort. The Portuguese held on to Diu till as recently as 1961. The last of the outposts in Asia, Macau, was handed back to the Chinese in 1999. The Portuguese had been the first Europeans to come to this part of the world and they were the last to leave. ROUND WORLD, FLAT MAP When Vasco da Gama landed in India, there were around 110 million people living in the country. China had around 103 million, the United Kingdom 3.9 million and Portugal just 1 million. India was still a major economic power with a share of 24.5 per cent of world GDP. But this was smaller than the one-third share of world GDP that it had enjoyed in the first millennium CE. Around 1500, the Chinese economy went past the Indian one in terms of its size for the first time. The per capita income or

the income earned per person in India also fell below the global average. After having been behind India for centuries, most European countries had higher per capita incomes. The richest country in Europe, Italy, had a per capita income that was twice as much as India’s. There were rulers like Akbar and Krishnadeva Raya who created periods of prosperity but this did not reverse the trend. The Mughal court was grand and glittering in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—but this hid the fact that India was slowly falling behind Europe. The Europeans were technologically more advanced than everyone else in this period. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, they were simply miles ahead in map-making. The discoveries of the Portuguese were put down on hand-drawn maps and these charts were considered top secret. Before each voyage, the captain was allowed to make a copy from the royal library and was expected to return it with new discoveries marked out when he got back. Not surprisingly, the maps were something the others wanted to steal! In 1502, Alberto Cantino, an agent of the Duke of Ferrera, stole a chart from Lisbon and took it to Italy. It is preserved in the Biblioteca Estense of Modena and shows that the Portuguese had quickly worked out that India was a peninsula though many elements of Ptolemaic geography were still included. The first map showing the Indian Peninsula to be published for the public was by Johan Ruysch in Rome in 1508. It shows India as a peninsula and marks a few of the ports on the coast but doesn’t show much of the country’s interiors. The Indus and the Ganga are the only two Indian rivers marked but their courses are not really accurate. It also shows the Malaya peninsula and marks Melaka. A well-known map by Waldseemüller in 1513 is similar. Over the next century, more maps were published and knowledge about India’s geography improved. But mistakes were often made and passed on by map-makers copying information from each other. Empty spaces were filled up with drawings that often looked inspired by Mandeville’s fantasies!

However, geographical knowledge went through a major change in the sixteenth century. At the centre of this revolution were Geradus Mercator and Abraham Ortilius, both from the Low Countries. The Low Countries form the coastal region in north-western Europe. These include Belgium, the Netherlands, and the low-lying delta of the Rhine, Meuse, Scheldt and Ems rivers, where a large part of the Land is at or below sea level. Mercator was born in 1512 near Antwerp and by the time he was twenty- four, he was already an expert map-maker. He doesn’t seem to have travelled to the faraway lands that were being newly discovered but he put together all the information available about them. In 1538, he published his first world map that is one of the earliest to have the names of North and South America. He also showed Asia and America to be separate continents long before the discovery of the Bering Strait proved it. Mercator lived in a time of religious and political chaos. He was an innovator who asked too many questions and was regarded with suspicion. In 1544, he was arrested for being a heretic, someone who was going against the accepted religious beliefs of the times. Thankfully for Mercator, he had powerful friends, or he was sure to have been tortured or even burnt at the stake! A few years later, Mercator shifted East to Duisburg where he produced his most famous work. In 1569, he produced his world map with the lines ‘New and Improved Description of the Lands of the World, amended and intended for the use of navigators.’ The map did not just have better information than earlier maps, it also used a novel way of depicting the curved surface of the world on a flat surface. This was a major innovation.

Did you know? The ‘Mercator Projection’ is still the most commonly used format for a world map even though it is based on a distortion that squeezes the countries near the equator and stretches those near the poles. This is why countries like Norway and Sweden look much larger than they are in reality while India and Indonesia look definitely smaller.

Ortilius produced the first atlas in 1570 in Antwerp with Mercator’s encouragement. The first edition of the atlas had seventy sheets and was called the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum(Theatre of the World). It was such a big success that forty editions were eventually published. The rediscovery of the classical Greek and Roman works had a deep impact on the Europeans of that time. Ortilius took pains to include a map that tried to fit in the new findings about India with the Periplus and with Arrian’s account of Alexander’s expedition. The map locates cities like Pataliputra and Muzaris accurately though so many years had passed. THE CITY OF VICTORY A feature very prominently drawn in early European maps of India is the kingdom of Narsinga that covers much of the southern peninsula. Most modern Indians will not know where this place is but it refers to what is now remembered as the Vijayanagar Empire, which was named after its capital city. It was ruled by Narasingha Raya when the Portuguese first arrived in India. He was not a very important king in the history of Vijayanagar but his name stuck and Europeans continued to mark it on their maps long after he and his empire were gone.